I'm grateful here, as I follow on from yesterday's post, to Maude Ouellette-Dubé, a graduate student at the University of Fribourg, whose Masters dissertation I have been reading.
She was arguing for the importance of emotions in animal ethics, but the point holds generally.
Another thought experiment here. Imagine a robot who has been programmed to behave like a fully ethical agent. He, Serge, recognises that injustice is wrong, so too lying and breaking promises, killing and rape; he recognises that fairness is a good, as is equality, freedom of expression and so on. But he is programmed to comprehend, not to feel. He can make the utilitarian calculus, but he does not experience suffering or happiness or anything in between.
Here is the question: without feeling anger, can Serge really understand what offense means? Without feeling compassion can he really understand the suffering of a friend? Do we not feel that something is missing in his understanding of values because he does not feel emotions? Certainly, Serge cannot understand the way that values are linked to our lives and relationships because that is what emotions do. Instead, Serge is behaving well with no inner conception of why that matters. For him, value terms like 'admirable' and 'shameful' are purely descriptive - like 'green' or 'triangular'. The concepts are limited. They may direct behaviour, but they can't deepen understanding.
The argument also puts the view that emotions, as bodily responses, prepare us for action. Fear prepares us to flee; compassion to give comfort; anger to strike out. They orient us in the world as agents rather than as passive surveyors of what's happening. The emotions make the world significant while also aligning us to act in accordance with the value that we experience as a felt response. They are motivational. And this, I think, is important.
Serge can do the right thing through calculation - as could a sociopath or a psychopath - and appear functional; but a 'good' person does the right action for the right reasons because she understands which considerations constitute moral reasons. And this understanding is enriched by the emotional responses to wrongs.
For example, we may be in a conversation and just saying what comes to mind' and then register an emotional response on the face of the other - pain or shame, say - and we may experience a sense of guilt. We can root back into our conversation to work out what has led to that response - the emotion can act as an alarm bell. This will help us to fine-tune our behaviour. Here Ouellette-Dubé points out that emotions to be accompanied by the right kind of attention to yield reliable moral understanding. She refers to the work of Iris Murdoch. And though I am convinced of these arguments on one level, there's also a case to be made that using emotions are only reliable guides if the person experiencing them has appropriate depends knowledge, experience and objectivity - which seems to demand a kind of moral elitism.
I'm persuaded in part by the view of Robert Solomon that emotions are 'choices' to the extent that they can often be dependent on what we have chosen to believe about an issue. So, we can learn about injustice, say, choose to care about it and its causes, and then come to feel angry when we see evidence of it; we can learn about the sentience of other animals and choose to believe they have certain rights and thus come to feel compassion at their suffering.
The concept of 'choice' though is tricky. Can one choose to believe in God or not? There are people who have 'reasoned themselves' out of religion. The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, for example, became an atheist after reading Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian. But this seems to be a minority example. I don't know what it is that inclines one to believe in a deity. Habit, custom and upbringing? Perhaps an emotional need? Can one choose to believe that such and such a person is lovable? In the latter case, it seems that emotions, as David Hume suggests, have more control than reason. And thus, we could continue to feel disdain for the poor and so carry on believing, say, that they are always lazy and stupid and that's why they are poor; that we do live in a pure meritocracy and that everyone has the opportunity to make the best of themselves and consequently there is no evidence of social inequality.
On the other hand, as those who propose the concept of care ethics suggest, we have a 'natural' inclination to feel sad when we see someone suffering, feel angry when we see someone attacked for no reason and that these innate tendencies are the basis for our moral feelings.
I think there is 'truth' in all these arguments. But it leaves us with a complicated picture of reason and emotion bound together, guiding each other, and yet malleable. If we have little faith in the value of emotions as guides, or as motivators, or indeed in their malleability, then it looks as though a reliance on reason - the utilitarian calculus - is the sensible solution. On the other hand, if we accept that emotions can enrich, empower and assist our moral wisdom, then we still need to take on the responsibility of educating ourselves so that our moral sense, as closely as possible, guides us toward the kind of world that we want: fairer, kinder and more honest.
I can't see beyond Murdoch's comprehensive view of balancing utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics. I really can't.
But I would like to add this Aeon article to the mix. Helen de Cruz, professor of philosophy and Danforth Chair in the humanities at Saint Louis University in Missouri. argues that awe creates a fertile soil for scientific discovery. In the article, she considers Jean-Paul Sartre's view of the emotions - which Solomon developed. Sartre wrote that emotions are things that we do - which are purposive and intentional. We get angry to get out of a stuck, unsafe or unfair situation. We change the world by changing our outlook, which happens as we alter our emotional state. De Cruz is sceptical of this. She does though discuss both ways to instigate awe (by noticing more carefully and, as it happens, unselfing!) and how awe encourages a state of questioning, creativity and epistemic humility. The cynic, the sceptic, the rigidly reason-based and the closed minded among us will find this frame of mind both harder to access and perhaps unwelcome - as it suggest possibilities, changes of mind and the need to know that what we do not know. It strikes me that this is exactly the same as far as ethics are concerned.
NOTES
Added 28th July 2020 - this article shows how the use of blame and guilt has encouraged Swedes to take environmental action by flying less.
Comments